You're receiving this email because you subscribed to my newsletter (possibly through a past project like Krit or Startup Watching). I write about bootstrapped startups, mental health, and my attempts to lead a fulfilling life. If you don't want to get these emails anymore click here to unsubscribe, no hard feelings!

Hey friend,

When I made the decision to put ChartJuice on the back-burner, I picked up a new idea that's been tossing around in my head for a long time.

For years I've been writing on the internet, and trying to grow traffic through SEO. It's the perfect form of marketing. You create valuable content, structure it the right way, and Google helps the right users find you.

But I was always busy with other work and working with a scrappy budget. So a lot of the SEO grunt work fell through the cracks. Things that are important, but tedious. Things like optimizing page titles, writing descriptions, adding descriptive alt text, and setting internal links.

I had always dreamed about having a tool that would just do those things for me. And as generative AI became better and better, it seemed obvious that it was more possible than ever before. So I recruited my longtime co-founder and we got to work building MetaMonster.

MetaMonster is an SEO crawler that finds and fixes issues for you. The MVP:

• Finds pages on your site with missing or broken page titles and meta descriptions
• Generates optimized versions with a single click
• Publishes your new titles and descriptions directly to Wordpress (you can also export to a CSV)

Here's what one of our alpha users had to say:

"There's been a noticeable increase in search traffic ever since using MetaMonster. It helped me identify, fix, and improve a lot of issues I didn't know I had. Some of my best content wasn't landing in search until MetaMonster fixed it."

And this is just the start. Alt text, internal links, optimizing headers, all of the things I never felt like I had time for. We eventually want to do all of it.

The MetaMonster beta officially launches next week - April 7. If you run a marketing or SEO agency, or have to manage a lot of content, I would love for you to try it out. I'll send another email when we're officially live. Now, onto the rest of the newsletter.

Cheers,

Andrew

For bootstrappers

​5 years without meetings​

Laura Roeder has been writing a lot lately about the way she runs things at her new company PaperBell. It's all async, part-time, with no meetings, and no wasted time. It's not exactly the kind of culture I think I want to build, but I love when people do things differently and make them work. It's always good to challenge our perceptions of how things should be done.

​How do you find Founder-Product Fit?​

Loving the Panel podcast from my friend Brian Casel! He teemed up with Justin Jackson, and they bring on two bootstrappers each episode to have a discussion about topics that are relevant to the community. Love the range of perspectives you get compared to a lot of traditional podcasts.

​Unpopular opinion: public relations is the future of marketing​

Great short video from Rand Fishkin on the latest trend in marketing. As AI searches grow, and Google's algorithm changes significantly to favor existing brands, we're seeing a resurgence in PR as a marketing channel. Getting into name-brand publications can help your ranking in Google as well as the likelihood your brand or product is referenced in AI responses.

From me

​Prompt engineering for SEOs​

I've been wanting to write this guide for a while. I've learned a lot about LLMs (Large Language Models) and prompt engineering through my work on MetaMonster, and I wanted to share what I've learned. More than any of the technical details, the thing I hope people really take away from this is that LLMs store probabilities, not facts. Which means you should look at the output as a range of possible outcomes, not a single response like you get from a typical computer query.

For fun

​The hidden story of Miranda Goes Outside​

I've been getting the itch to go backpacking again, but don't have the time right now, so I've been watching lots of backpacking content on YouTube instead. This is a fun interview between two of my favorite outdoor YouTubers.

​My favorite new cocktail find: The Bitter Giuseppe​

My latest cocktail find is the Bitter Giueseppe, a low-ABV sipper made with Cynar, sweet Vermouth, lemon juice, and orange bitters. If you like bitter flavors, this is a really fun cocktail, and won't get you too tipsy.

​The most exciting match at our latest robotics competition​

Almost all of my free time right now is going to the high school robotics team I mentor. We have been on a TEAR this year. We made it to the finals of our first competition, the semi-finals of our second competition, took home two awards, qualified for the State Championship for the first time and have a 60% chance of qualifying for the World Championship right now. All of this from a team that's only 7 years old with less than 15 kids, and a fraction of the resources of a lot of the bigger teams we go up against. Here's the footage from our most exciting match at the latest competition if you want to get a feel for what robotics is all about. We won by 3 points.

​